Conduit celebrates 30 years of IT service

LINCOLN – IT-services firm Conduit Systems celebrated its 30th year of business in Rhode Island this month.

Since the company was founded in 1984, Conduit Systems has grown from a two-man computer-aided design team to a generalized IT service provider with between 45 and 50 clients, most of them local to Rhode Island or the New England region. Those clients include nearly 1,000 desktops and a couple hundred servers that Conduit Systems is responsible for maintaining.

Tully crossed paths with Conduit Systems Founder and President David Cameron in the mid-1980s, and officially joined the company in 1989. By then, Conduit Systems had already been in business for several years, building on the momentum of the new commercial computer industry.

“[1984] was the pivotal year in terms of the PC,” said Tully. “IBM and Apple both pushed out products that year, and certainly what was suddenly available to businesses and individuals was the kind of computing power that we were typically only seeing in much larger companies.”

For nearly eight years, Cameron and Tully operated as a two-man business, focusing on CAD consulting for architectural firms and manufacturing companies, and later, as they began to reshape the company around generalized IT support, they hired more tech support and engineers. Today, Conduit Systems no longer provides CAD services, instead focusing on infrastructure, desktop support and server support for small- and mid-sized companies ranging in size from one to two people on up to a few hundred people.

“It’s interesting where we are now in terms of the cloud discussion that has been prevalent for last few years, it’s come full-circle from what we used to see back in the 80s, leveraging the infrastructure of a larger corporation or provider,” said Tully.

Adapting to new technologies like the cloud – and researching potential new data solutions – is a big focus of the company today.

“We realize that we don’t have all the answers, but we have most of the answers for a particular need, and we hire a skill set that’s as diverse as we can get,” said Tully. “One tech might have a certain skill set, we try to get our next hire to be different in a number of ways, fold their combined experience into one big pot and we leverage our tech experience as much as we can.”

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